Create a Web Based Song Activity in Minutes

Back in December 2010 I wrote an article about how you could use Batlyrics, a site which combined Song videos and lyrics, as a corpus to find examples of grammar or vocabulary you wanted your students to focus on: 'Lyrics and Video and Grammar - Song as Corpus'

Since writing this article I've spotted another useful feature of the site, and that is the addition of an embed code button.

This is really helpful, because now it means that you can select the song you want to use, copy the embed code and then embed it into your own web page or blog and write your activity around it.
This is particularly easy if you use the Posterous blogging platform, as all you need to do is copy and paste the embed code into and email, add a title and instructions and post it off to post@posterous.com.


A few seconds later you should get a message back with a link to your published activity. Then you just share the link with your students.

• Here's a quick example that I created: In my life

So now you can create quick online song based activities within just a few minutes. I hope you find Batlyrics useful.

Related links:

• 5 Tasks to Teach Yourself to Teach with Technology
• 3 More Tasks to Teach Yourself to Teach with Technology
• Animated Music Videos for EFL
  
• Using Word Clouds in EFL
• 6 Activities you can do online with songs and music
• Can Music Aid Memory of Text?
• Karaoke with a Social

Best

Nik Peachey

Lyrics and Video and Grammar - Song as Corpus

A while ago I wrote a posting (Teaching Grammar Through Songs) on how you could search song lyrics for particular words or phrases, then find the lyrics and video to go with the song. In the posting, this involved using two different sites, but now I have found one site that does the whole thing.

The site is called Batlyrics. It's very simple to use. You just go to the search part of the site and click the 'Lyrics Words' search.

Then type in the phrase, structure or words you want to find in the text and you'll see the possible phrases from the lyrics start to appear.
Once you select one, you will be linked through to a page of possible versions of the song. Select the one you want and the video of the song should appear with the lyrics underneath.
This is a really fast way to find motivating listening materials for your students that deal with specific structures or vocabulary.

Using this with EFL students

• You can get students to search for their own examples and learn the words.
• You can use it as a way to find listening materials and copy the lyrics to make into classroom activities such as gap fill or reorganising the text.
• You could cut and past the lyrics into this cloze test creator and you then have an interactive listening activity. Better still students could find there own songs and copy the lyrics into the cloze test creator so that they create their own personalised activities.

Batlyrics is free to use, but it does carry quite a lot of advertising though so be careful where you click.

I hope you find Batlyrics useful. Here you can find more EFL / ESL activities that use songs.

Related links:

• Animated Music Videos for EFL
  
• Using Word Clouds in EFL
• 6 Activities you can do online with songs and music
• Can Music Aid Memory of Text?
• Karaoke with a Social

Best

Nik Peachey

Teaching Grammar Through Songs

I have to admit that I find teaching grammar a bit on the boring side and finding good examples of grammatical structures in interesting authentic text can be quite time consuming, so when I saw this lyrics search tool Lyreach I was instantly impressed.

All you need to do is type in an example of your grammar structure and you can then find it in a whole range of different song lyrics.


This links to the lyrics start to show beneath the search box as you type, and then you just click on the sentence to link to the correct verse from the song. You'll see the part of the song highlighted and there's a link to a clip from Amazon.



Unfortunately the clip is only the start of the song and may not have your grammar example in, but it is easy from hear to find the clip on YouTube or find the clip and the rest of the lyrics together using a tool like Tubeoke that matches clips to lyrics.

So now using these two easy tools you can find lots of authentic examples of your grammar points in song lyrics and create quick activities based around them. You could even paste the lyrics from the verse into Wordle and use it as a prompt to get the students to drill, memorize or review the verse after they listen.

So, who says technology doesn't save time??

I hope you find Lyreach useful.

Related links:

• Using Word Clouds in EFL
• 6 Activities you can do online with songs and music
• Can Music Aid Memory of Text?
• Karaoke with a Social

Best

Nik Peachey

Animated Music Videos for EFL

I came across these videos today while I was trawling through YouTube and was instantly struck by what great materials they would be for EFL ESL students.



I found two sets the first produced by musicANDmuffins and the second SereneRhapsody. There are five videos in each collection and they all use songs with quite clear simple lyrics. The animation is marvelous and clever, though very simple and clearly illustrates the meaning of the songs while showing the lyrics.


It really wouldn't take much work to turn each of these into a short language lesson, or you could use one as an example for your students and get them to draw simple illustrations for a song and create their own video.

These are fantastic authentic materials. Be sure to subscribe to their channel to find out when any new ones come along.

You can find video activities for EFL ESL students here.

Related links:

• Multimedia Travel Activities
• Creating multimedia stories
• News Videos for EFL ESL Materials Design
• Things You Can Do With Your WebCam 1
• Exploiting a Video Viral
• Lesson plan Top 10 Cartoons for Children’s Rights
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Videos for Global Issues Lessons
• Update on the Education Clip Library

Best

Nik Peachey

Get the Stars to Sing Your Students' Words

This is a site that I first saw about 4 years ago and then lost. It is called Let Them Sing It For You and I just found it on one of Laryy Ferlazzzo's lists (The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly & Painlessly)


Like most of the best web tools and ideas in general it is very simple. You type words into a field, click a button and then you can hear the words being sung. You can them email a link to the song to yourself or a friend and then paste the link into a workheet or blog page etc.


The site generates the song through a huge dictionary of audio clips from famous songs, so the song is a collection of some of the worlds singers with each word by a different singer and from a different song. It's just such a wonderful idea and so quick to use.

• You can get your students writing songs, short messages etc.
• You can copy and paste in lyrics of songs (you can find lyrics here)and get your students to listen and try to guess what the original song was. Try this one.
• Not all of the words are included in the database, so the site will put in words that have some of the same letters. You can use this by printing up lyrics for your students and getting them to listen and circle where the mistakes are.
• You could even get them to listen and try to guess who sung the original words and what song they came from (probably easier for adult students as most of the songs are quite old)

Thanks again to Larry for helping me to rediscover Let Them Sing It For You one of my favourite tools.

Related links:

• Write a Music Video Review
• Spot Talent for your Record Label
• Can Music Aid Memory of Text?
• Karaoke with a Social Network
• Another Great New Karaoke Site
• Great New Karaoke Site

Best

Nik Peachey

Great New Karaoke Site

I was really pleased to be offered a sneak preview of the fantastic new Lucky Voice Karaoke website which is still in private beta.

Karaoke can be really motivating for some students and as we all know, song is a great way to improve our EFL / ESL students' pronunciation.

The site itself has a really easy to use interface. Once you select a song to sing along with it comes up in a big pop up window which you could display full screen on an interactive whiteboard if you are brave enough to work with a whole class on a song. The words of the song change colour as you should sing them.

You get a bit of help on the chorus, when the original singers join in. If you are using this with students it might be a good idea to play the complete song by the original singer before starting to get them to work on the songs on the site. That way they'll get a better sense of the timing and when to start singing.

You can find more ideas for using karaoke with EFL / ESL students on my Learning Technology blog posted under the title of 'Karaoke with a Social Network'

The selection of songs is also quite broad with quite a lot of up to date songs as well as some older classics. They also have some ready created playlists which are quite handy.

This will certainly be a useful site once it goes public and is one of the best designed Karaoke sites I've seen.

I hope you and your students are able to enjoy it soon.

Related postings:
Transcribed Videos for EFL ESL
Karaoke with a Social Network

Best

Nik Peachey